Parisiennes vs the Nazis
June 2018, Hel-lo? blog for The Sydney Institute
On July 1, French politician and women’s advocate Simone Veil née Jacob, who died last year at 89, will become the first Jewish woman to be laid to rest in France’s Pantheon mausoleum. She will lie alongside four other women, including Marie Curie, and 76 men.
Veil’s life was shaped by her deportation in 1944, as a teenager, along with her mother, to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she survived but her mother didn’t.
Her painful tale is one of many threaded through British historian Anne Sebba’s mesmerising tale of women in Nazi-occupied France, Les Parisiennes: How the women of Paris lived, loved, and died in the 1940s.
It is a story of women forced to make excruciating choices. To send your children away or not, even if the former meant, for their safety, not knowing where they would go? To walk out of a restaurant if Germans walked in, or keep silent? To risk your life distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets or win protection by collaborating?
But as one man, playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg told Sebba harshly, when she asked him about his mother’s choice to send him and his brother away, “La choix, c’est contestable.” That is, he meant, his Romanian Jewish mother, whose husband had been arrested, had no real choice in the matter.
But Sebba insists that “choices, however heart-wrenching, were indeed made by women, especially women”.
When Sebba set out to tell the stories of these women, her inquiries so often were met with the phrase “c’est très compliqué”. Even now, as she writes in the prologue to her fascinating exploration of morals, courage, evil, human nature, ambiguity and fear, the reactions of the French, who refer to those years as les Années Noires, the Dark Years, show that the past is not yet the past in France.
Sebba (left) was originally counselled by a male historian colleague to dive into the diaries of various distinguished men to tell the story of the occupation, but, she writes, “I have tried to find an alternative, often quieter and frequently less well-known set of voices”.
Face to face over coffee at The Twenty-One café in Sydney’s cosmopolitan Double Bay, as the chef pounds veal relentlessly in the background, the glamorous historian, who was here recently for a month on a regional tour, is vehement. “Why the hell has no-one told [this story] before!”
“It’s the nuances that intrigue me,” she says later. “Nothing is black and white.”
The real collaborators, she insists, were those who betrayed or denounced, or sneaked to the Gestapo about their Jewish neighbour.” But if someone was getting on with their daily life, Sebba refuses to categorise these as collaborators. “Why don’t you round up all the vegetable sellers!” she says vehemently.
And what so many of us don’t realise is that by the time the Germans marched into Paris, it was a city of women. “There were no young men there. Nearly two million had been taken POW.” The others were dead, called up or – and rather fewer than popular history once made out – had gone underground.
One resistante, Germaine Tillion tells Sebba, “France in 1940 was unbelievable. There were no men left. It was women who started the Resistance.”
Sebba ponders the dilemmas facing the women as the German soldiers, seemingly well-behaved, well-fed, able to provide food and medicines, took over the hungry, frightened city.
“I kept saying to myself, ‘what would I have done?’ I’d like to think if I had been young, a teenager, of course I would have joined the Resistance. But once you have children or elderly parents or both, other factors weigh in.”
Sebba, a former Reuters journalist who has now made her name with a string of biographies with subjects ranging from Mother Teresa to Jennie Churchill, had been interested in this period of French history since she studied at King’s College in London.
But it was the notorious Wallis Simpson who led her to write this book. A tiny fact in Sebba’s research for her groundbreaking 2011 biography of Wallis Simpson piqued her curiosity.
“I realized that Wallis was in Paris in 1940. And I found it so intriguing that Edward [who had abdicated as Edward VIII to marry Wallis and who had been assigned to the British Military Mission near Vincennes outside Paris as France tried to fight off Germany] didn’t even go to Dunkirk. He was more interested in going to [the jeweller] Cartier to oversee this state of the art flamingo brooch with a retractable leg for Wallis’ birthday. I thought to myself, ‘What is Cartier doing open in 1940?! Why is the couture industry flourishing?’ All the things that gave Paris its reputation as the City of Light flourished.”
Sebba argues that French women who, unlike their British and American sisters obviously couldn’t wear war uniform, wanted to stamp their sense of self, style, to show the Germans, who finally took Paris on June 14 (the Windsors had headed south), that “whatever you do to us, we’re still going to look smart and elegant”.
She even writes the story of one imprisoned Parisian woman, with “sores on her skin and scars from lashings”, who decided that rather than eat the ounce of fat she was given daily, she’d massage it into her hands instead, reckoning they needed it more than her stomach.
There is heartbreak and tragedy on almost every second page of this compelling book as well as tales of friendship, kindness, nobility and bone-chilling bravery.
Some stories of cowardice and collaboration are horrific and Coco Chanel who spent the war years living at the Paris Ritz with her lover, an aristocratic German officer, gets short shrift from Sebba. But then there’s the French policeman who twice warns ballroom dancer Sadie Rigal, who sheltered Jews and transported weapons as part of an informal resistance network, that her flat is about to be searched.
As Sebba digs into this history tres compliqué, she discovers inconsistencies. Immediately after the war for instance, the French women who had been sent to camps like Ravensbruck for their Resistance activities were treated differently from women who had been deported to the concentration camps like Auschwitz. The former were honoured with state decorations and higher compensation, the latter were seen as victims.
The story of Simone Veil who had been sent to Auschwitz as a Jewish deportee but whose sister, Denise, went to Ravensbruck as a resistanteillustrates it perfectly.
Denise was made Commandeur of the Legion d’Honneur and awarded several other grand medals.
But for Simone, who lost her parents and a brother to the Germans, “we were only victims and not heroes. What we experienced mattered little, something people did not fail to tell us in a brutal way …”
“She spoke of ‘being forgotten’ as a second death,” Sebba writes. People then didn’t know what the camps were like. Nor was it clear that they wanted to know. Sebba reports that of the “resisters” who went to Germany, half returned “but only 3 per cent of the Jews (2500 out of 76,000 deported).”
Veil, a philosopher, went on to become a government minister, a champion of women’s rights and first president of an elected European parliament.
But in any case, the stories of all these women in Sebba’s book – resisters, deportees, helpers, special operations volunteers parachuted into France - were pretty much ignored after peacetime set in and as General de Gaulle went out of his way to honour the men and build the mythic story of a massive French resistance movement. The women were encouraged back into their roles as mothers, housewives.
Sebba has finally told their stories.
This item appeared in Issue 15 of my blog Hel-lo? for the Sydney Institute in June, 2018. Les Parisiennes - How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba (Hachette Australia, $22.99
